Tim DeChristopher entering Scott Matheson Courthouse July 26, 2011 Salt Lake City Utah USA. Photo/Jonathan Mauer/Wikimedia

On April 21, the day before Earth Day, Tim DeChristopher was released from custody by the Department of Justice. He had served 21 months for having committed an act of civil disobedience against a government bureau that had violated the law.

In his mid-20s, DeChristopher, who graduated from high school in Pittsburgh, was in Utah to work as a wilderness guide with at-risk and troubled youth.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in the last month of the George W. Bush presidency (December 2008), decided to auction 149,000 acres of public land in southern Utah; most of the land was near national parks. Big Energy was there to scoop up what it could at bargain basement prices in order to drill for gas and oil. Environmentalists protested, and filed suits to block the sale, but didn’t have the money to outbid the gas and oil companies.

DeChristopher, an economics student at the University of Utah, didn’t have the money, either. But, on a spontaneous decision after he entered the auction, he got a paddle and bidder number 70. After watching energy companies take parcel after parcel of pristine land at prices as low as $40 an acre, he bid on parcels to inflate the price, eventually winning bids on 14 of those parcels, totaling 22,500 acres. His winning bids, about $1.7 million, would have given him prime federal land for about $77 an acre.

His actions voided the auction, but succeeded in holding up the sale until a federal court the following month issued a temporary injunction, ruling that the BLM violated federal environmental and historic protection laws. A month later, the Obama administration revoked the sale of 77 parcels totaling more than 100,000 acres. The sale price of those parcels averaged about $60 an acre. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Department had “rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases at the doorstep of some of our greatest national icons, some of our nation’s most treasured landscapes.”

Although DeChristopher and hundreds of thousands of activists succeeded in reversing the BLM sale and kept the land from being carved up by drillers, they didn’t succeed in obtaining justice. The federal government continued its pursuit of DeChristopher who now increased his activism, further enraging the prosecution. In April 2009, four months after the auction, he was indicted for fraud and violation of the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act.

On the night before his trial at the end of February 2011, hundreds gathered at the First Unitarian Church.

Four days later, after nine postponements requested by the Department of Justice, DeChristopher was convicted. The court had refused to allow the defense to present evidence that the auction was illegal or that other successful bidders reneged on their commitments and were not prosecuted. “The injustice in this case wasn’t that I was facing a trial,” said DeChristopher, “It’s that the jury was denied the information to decide if my actions were justified.”

During the next four months, the Department of Justice ran an extensive investigation on DeChristopher, and recommended he be sentenced to probation, with no jail time. DeChristopher and his attorneys had previously rejected a plea bargain that would have given him a 30-day jail sentence and probation.

However, Judge Dee Benson disregarded the Department of Justice recommendation, and ordered DeChristopher to pay a $10,000 fine and serve a two year sentence.

During the trial, the prosecutor had argued that DeChristopher could have halted the auction in other peaceful ways or that he could have appealed the awarding of land. During the sentencing hearing, DeChristopher pointed out, “it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits [for land]. The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing.”

He also referred to a New York Times investigation that, said DeChristopher, revealed “a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr. Huber [the federal prosecutor] says I lacked respect.”

Judge Benson openly acknowledged, “The offense itself, with all apologies to people actually in the auction itself, wasn’t that bad,” and stated he might not have imposed a prison sentence—but that DeChristopher’s “continuing trail of statements” and activism following his arrest was not acceptable. Thus, a federal court ruled that exercising a First Amendment right was a factor in sentencing, a decision the Appeals court later affirmed on technicalities.

Within two hours of sentencing, several dozen people in Salt Lake City protested, linking themselves together and blocking traffic. Police arrested 26, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune. Dozens of peaceful demonstrations occurred at federal courthouses throughout the country, the people energized and angry that the government pursued charges against an activist who had help prove the auction he had stopped was illegal.

Robert Redford, actor/director and environmental activist, summed up the hypocrisy of the prosecution: “He just did what he thought was his constitutional right. In the meantime we have all these guys on Wall Street sending this country into the tank. And no one’s going to jail. No one’s even being brought to justice.”

Not long after his arrest, DeChristopher formed Peaceful Upraising, an organization devoted to protecting the environment.

In September, DeChristopher will enter the Harvard Divinity School on a full scholarship; after three years of study, he will earn a master of divinity degree, with the intent to be ordained as a Unitarian minister.

On Earth Day this year, the day after DeChristopher was released, among thousands of activities throughout the world, 50 venues broadcast Bidder 70, a compelling 73-minute documentary by Beth and George Gage. They had spent three years researching and producing the story of a man who helped uncover illegal activities by the government, yet was imprisoned. Henry David Thoreau, who had been jailed for refusing to pay taxes that supported the illegal Mexican–American War, 1846–1848 (known by Mexicans as the American Invasion) would be proud.

Walter Brasch is an award-winning journalist, whose latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an overview of the environmental, health, worker safety effects of fracking, and which peels away the industry claims of the economic benefits.

Photo/redstarphoto.net

Nearly a year ago, I asked If Obama Withdrew the Yoo, Bradbury Torture Memos, What Government Opinion Now Covers The AFM and Appendix M? The question has direct relevance today, because the Army Field Manual on interrogation (FM 2-22.3) and its Appendix M governs current interrogation policy at Guantanamo, where a major hunger strike of over 100 detainees has paralyzed operations. Detainees are protesting the hopelessness of indefinite detention, and the harassment they must endure, including searches of their holy book, the Koran.

This article answers the question I asked earlier. It documents the fact the Obama administration never rescinded a Bush-era memo on the use of controversial interrogation tactics for use by the U.S. military. The memo concerned “restricted” techniques to be included in the 2006 revision of the Army Field Manual.  As a result, today torture and abuse remain a part of U.S. military interrogation doctrine.

The April 13, 2006 memo was written by Stephen Bradbury, who was also author of two 2005 memos on the CIA torture-interrogation program that were subsequently withdrawn.

According to LTC Todd Breasseale in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), Obama’s January 2009 Executive Order EO 13491, “Ensuring Lawful Interrogation,” widely understood and cited as voiding the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos, “did not cancel Mr. Bradbury’s legal review” of a rewritten Army Field Manual and its controversial Appendix M.

The latter, with its provisions for use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and forms of sensory deprivation, has been denounced as torture or abuse by a number of human rights and legal groups (see here andhere, for example).

LTC Breasseale explained in an email response to my query last year:

Executive Order (EO) 13491 did not withdraw “‘All executive directives, orders, and regulations… from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals.’” It revoked all executive directives, orders, and regulations that were inconsistent with EO 13491, as determined by the Attorney General…. [bold emphasis added]

One last point – you seem suggest below that EO 13491 somehow cancelled Steven Bradbury’s legal review of the FM. EO 13491 did not cancel Mr. Bradbury’s legal review of the FM.”

When I then asked the Department of Justice to confirm what Breasseale had said for a story on the Bradbury memo, spokesman Dean Boyd wrote to tell me, “We have no comment for your story.” The fact Boyd did not object to Breasseale’s statement seems to validate the DoD spokesman’s statement.

Breasseale also described DoD’s view that both the current AFM and Appendix M were “not inconsistent with EO 13491,” which “expressly prohibits subjecting any individual in the custody of the U.S. Government to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in the FM. In addition, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 expressly prohibits subjecting any individual in the custody of the U.S. Department of Defense to any treatment or technique of interrogation that is not authorized by and listed in the FM. In short, both the President and the Congress have determined that the interrogation techniques listed in the FM are lawful,” Breasseale said.

But just how “lawful” were these interrogation techniques in the new AFM and Appendix M? A look at the history of their development belies DoD’s assurances.

Double-talk on Interrogation Executive Order

It is somewhat understandable that most people believe President Obama cancelled all the Bush-era torture memos by executive order soon after taking office. The following is from the January 22, 2009 background briefing on the subject by the White House (emphases added):

Executive Order revokes Executive Order 13440 that interpreted Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. It requires that all interrogations of detainees in armed conflict, by any government agency, follow the Army Field Manual interrogation guidelines. The Order also prohibits reliance on any Department of Justice or other legal advice concerning interrogation that was issued between September 11, 2001 and January 20, 2009. [bold added for emphasis]

But the blanket prohibition on reliance on “any” DoJ advice regarding interrogation is not what Obama’s Executive Order stated. EO 13491 states (emphases added):

Section 1.  Revocation.  Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, is revoked.  All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order.  Heads of departments and agencies shall take all necessary steps to ensure that all directives, orders, and regulations of their respective departments or agencies are consistent with this order.  Upon request, the Attorney General shall provide guidance about which directives, orders, and regulations are inconsistent with this order.

So this is not a blanket but a conditional prohibition, with a determination on what will be revoked dependent upon advice from the Attorney General. Eric Holder is President Obama’s attorney general.

While the famous torture memos written by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury and others were revoked, one of Bradbury’s memorandums was not revoked. This was the memo that authorized the rewritten Army Field Manual on interrogation and its Appendix M.

History of the Bradbury Memo on Appendix M

In April 2006, Stephen Bradbury, who wrote the 2005 torture memos that replaced earlier Office of Legal Counsel approvals for “enhanced interrogation” by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, signed off in a “Memorandum for the Record” on interrogation techniques in then soon-to-be-published new edition of the Army Field Manual guidelines on human intelligence gathering. The conclusions from Bradbury’s analysis were sent by letter to Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel William Haynes on the same date as the memo was filed.

The previous OLC approvals of DoD interrogation methods had a more confusing background than did even those for the CIA. In March 2003, the Department of Justice (DoJ) had released a memo approving various torture techniques for DoD. The memo was written by John Yoo. But by December 2003, OLC chief Jack Goldsmith had said the 2003 Yoo memo should be rescinded as too flawed. Yet it appears it was not finally withdrawn until June 2004. The entire narrative remains murky, as explained to the best of our current knowledge by Marcy Wheeler in an article a few years back.

It appears that OLC thought it had covered itself on approval of DoD techniques by referencing a briefing by Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Philbin given to the House Select Committee on Intelligence on July 14, 2004. Certainly by the time Bradbury was writing his memo signing off on Appendix M and the new AFM, he referenced the Philbin testimony as evidence that the DoD techniques did not amount to torture.

While Bradbury did not indicate when the AFM underwent revision, a major revision was already being circulated for comment by the JAG corps as early as summer 2004. It’s drafting, speculatively, was a reaction to the slow-motion withdrawal of the March 2003 Yoo memo.

For its part, the Philbin testimony noted that 17 of the 24 DoD techniques previously approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been in use for some years, and that only seven of the 24 techniques were “new” and in question. They were: 1) placing detainee in an “les than comfortable environment”; 2) “altering his diet”; 3) changes in environment to cause “moderate discomfort”, such as temperature changes; 4) adjusting the sleep cycle, “for example by requiring him to sleep days instead of nights, but without depriving him of sleep”; 5) convincing the detainee he is held by a country other than the U.S. (“False Flag”); 6) physical isolation, no longer than 30 days; and 7) “Mutt and Jeff”, or the good cop/bad cop routine.

In his testimony, Philbin essentially reiterated that under current U.S. law and judicial precedents, none of these techniques amounted to torture. In his AFM/Appendix M memo, Bradbury turned to the question of whether the techniques proposed in Appendix M violated laws against cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, laws rooted in the UN Convention Against Torture treaty signed by the United States, and reiterated at that time in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act.

According to Bradbury, the Philbin testimony had taken the torture issue off the table. But there weredifferences between what would be in Appendix M and the techniques listed by Philbin, though Bradbury falsely minimized them.

“Although the restricted techniques described in Appendix M differ in certain minor respects from those submitted in the Philbin testimony,” Bradbury wrote, “we do not think those differences are sufficient to alter the conclusions previously reached that the techniques comport with the general criminal statutes, the prohibition on torture, and the War Crimes Act.”

Many of the descriptions of the restricted techniques are censored in the released Bradbury AFM/Appendix M memo. But Bradbury did understand and made a point of stating that some of the techniques wouldn’t pass muster “if they were permitted in interrogation of all DoD detainees, regardless of their combatant status and without regard to the level of intelligence they might possess” [italics in original]. Bradbury also would not verify the Appendix M techniques would be lawful “if used in the criminal justice process as a means of obtaining information about ordinary crimes.”

While Appendix M has “Mutt and Jeff” and “False Flag” techniques, it also includes, according to Bradbury, three “Adjustment” techniques “designed to change the detainee’s environment,” though not supposedly in a torturous fashion.

“Separation”

Bradbury also discusses the “Separation” technique, admitting it amounts to isolation “not to exceed 30 days without express authorization from a senior military officer.” Philbin had not discussed extensions to isolation beyond 30 days, but Bradbury doesn’t mention that. He cites the senior officer authorization, and the fact that detainees would “continually be monitored by medical personnel” as safeguards against harm to the detainee. It is clear, too, that such isolation is not merely for safety purposes, as Bradbury notes “the important role isolation can play in conditioning detainees for interrogation.”

Bradbury never mentions that unlike the Philbin memo authorizations, the AFM was approving use of limited sleep deprivation (no more than 4 hours of sleep allowed per day for up to 30 days, with extensions allowed by senior officers) and sensory deprivation (use of black-out goggles in so-called “field expedient separation”).

In his memo, Bradbury explained that DoJ/OLC had “not been asked to assess the consistency of those [Appendix M] techniques with the requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice” [UCMJ]. Hence, Bradbury said he assumed that DoD had “determined that the authorized use of the techniques, consistent with the applicable safeguards, accords with” the requirements of the UCMJ.

When asked if DoD made such a legal determination, LTC Breasseale said the new AFM “was scrutinized via a very thorough legal review at the highest level in the Pentagon prior to publication, so it is absolutely inconceivable for such a review not to have considered all legal aspects of the manual, including its adherence to the UCMJ.” He was not more specific about who specifically reviewed it, nor was there a reference to any particular document citing this adherence. Breasseale did note the manual has had no changes made to it since its publication in September 2006.

One Sentence Reviews Bulk of Army Field Manual

One of the most egregious aspects of Bradbury’s memo occur right at its very beginning. There, he states that the differences between the new AFM and its previous 1992 version (FM 34-52) amount to only “modest revisions” that are “fully consistent with… historical practice and thus do not require us to undertake a more detailed analysis of these issues.”

Thus in one sentence does Bradbury dismiss a number of significant changes to protections and policies of the old field manual. The sweep of his dismissal is breathtaking.

In fact, changes to the new AFM included significant revisions to how a controversial technique called “Fear Up” was used. In the new manual, interrogators were now allowed to produce “new phobias” for exploitation in the prisoner, something forbidden previously. Using phobias to produce stress and fear in detainees was a “Category II” interrogation technique in a list of techniques proposed to DoD based on SERE counter-resistance interrogation school methods.

The main text of the new AFM also included the excision of prohibitions against sleep deprivation and stress positions. The former was necessary to allow the use of sleep deprivation in Appendix M.

Former military interrogator Matthew Alexander wrote in a 2010 New York Times op-ed about the abuse inherent in the changes on sleep allowed in Appendix M:

The manual also allows limiting detainees to just four hours of sleep in 24 hours. Let’s face it: extended captivity with only four hours of sleep a night (consider detainees at Guantánamo Bay who have been held for seven years) does not meet the minimum standard of humane treatment, either in terms of American law or simple human decency.

And if this weren’t enough, some interrogators feel the manual’s language gives them a loophole that allows them to give a detainee four hours of sleep and then conduct a 20-hour interrogation, after which they can “reset” the clock and begin another 20-hour interrogation followed by four hours of sleep. This is inconsistent with the spirit of the reforms, which was to prevent “monstering” — extended interrogation sessions lasting more than 20 hours.

Finally, there were changes in the language concerning the drugging of detainees, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere. Use of drugs on detainees was not previously prohibited in the earlier AFM, citing language disallowing use of any drugs that produced “chemically induced psychosis.” In the new AFM, drugs could be used as long as they did not “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage,” a lower standard, requiring evidence of significant “lasting or permanent” harm.

Our understanding of exactly how DoD has used drugs on detainees is still evolving (see DoD’s IG reportand analyses of it here and here). As a matter of reference, according to a September 2004Congressional Research Service report on “Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques under the Geneva Conventions,” even the allowance of drugs in the 1990s version of the AFM was a change from earlier doctrine, which prohibited the use of drugs entirely for interrogations.

According to an article cited by CRS, “any attempt to extract information from an unwilling prisoner of war by the use of chemicals, drugs, physiological or psychological devices, which impair or deprive the prisoner of his free will without being in his interest, such as a bonafide medical treatment, will be deemed a violation of Articles 13 and 17 of the [1949 Geneva POW] Convention.”

Most recently, The Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, in a 560-page report documenting the use of torture by U.S. government agencies, noted:

The Army Field Manual on Interrogation should be amended so as to eliminate Appendix M, which permits the use of abusive tactics and to allow for the legitimate use of noncoercive separation. Language prohibiting the use of stress positions and abnormal sleep manipulation that was removed in 2006 should be restored.

Part of the problem in tackling the issue of torture and interrogation abuse in the current Army Field Manual concerns the misrepresentations concerning the steps actually taken in rewriting that document, as well as a myth that has grown up around Obama’s Jan. 2009 Executive Order on interrogations. With the recent admission by DoD that the Bradbury Appendix M memo was never rescinded by Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, we are closer to the day when such inhumane treatment is banished from official U.S. military intelligence doctrine.

Originally published at Firedoglake. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for Truthout, The Public Record and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Tacit confidentiality agreements between historians and interviewees are naturally crucial to the birth of these histories.

So what happens when the Department of Justice and the Police Service of Northern Ireland decide to violate the spirit of a treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom by subpoenaing a confidential collection of taped interviews detailing Northern Ireland’s militant past?

The purity of historical record, as well as fundamental First Amendment issues like freedom of the press, and more specifically source confidentiality, are now under attack by none other than US prosecutor Carmen Ortiz – the same district attorney criticized for what many people called overzealous prosecution that likely led to activist Aaron Swartz committing suicide – and the DOJ, at the behest of Northern Ireland’s police forces. These parties apparently see fit to enflame a tenuous peace in Northern Ireland by tearing open historical wounds through their desire to prosecute former Irish Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries for unsolved crimes.

Beginning three years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, heralded by some as the beginning of a new – and peaceful – chapter between the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, journalists Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre began tape recording interviews with members of Irish paramilitaries and their Loyalist foes. Their objective was to contribute a better academic understanding of what motivated otherwise ordinary individuals to join the armed conflict, as well as document the turbulent and important history known as The Troubles. They concluded their interviews in 2006 and the Belfast Project is stored today in Boston College’s Burns Library.

The lynchpin of the project was the confidentiality agreement McIntyre and Maloney forged with participants – from both sides of the conflict – some of whom divulged the names of militants. The stories were not to be released without their written consent or until their death.

Fast forward to 2011, when the Department of Justice, by way of a Clinton-era initiative called the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), attempted to force Boston College to release the tapes by recklessly (and improperly, as I’ll address below) subpoenaing these confidential interviews at the behest of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Authorities claim that Belfast Project interviews will assist in investigating the re-opened case of Jean McConville, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional IRA in 1972. Current Sinn Fein leader and Irish president Gerry Adams, among others, have been implicated in the crime. Republican militants admitted their culpability some 20 years later.

Some, like Anthony McIntyre – a writer, historian and former IRA member who was jailed for 18 years in Northern Ireland’s infamous Long Kesh prison and was released in 1996, believe the motivation for the subpoena is more complicated – and sinister – than a mere desire to solve a horrible crime that happened in 1972 however.

“[The justice angle] does not have much traction, given that the PSNI was heavily involved in using law enforcement to break the law and immerse itself as a player in the conflict [during the Troubles],” he tells me through email.

“It is certainly not interested in solving homicides per se. It is interested in the selective solving of some homicides. Hence we have killings involving state agents not being pursued but others involving people opposed to the state pursued.”

The checkered history of Northern Ireland’s security forces supports McIntyre’s suspicion that the subpoena is politically motivated. The former incarnation of the PSNI, from 1922 until 2001, was the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). This law enforcement organization has a storied history of human rights transgressions, as detailed in a number of reports, including one issued in 1991 by Human Rights Watch, which cite a wide range of abuses against Irish nationalists and which also point out numerous instances of RUC collusion with Loyalist paramilitaries.

Most notably, two members of a special anti-terrorist unit within the RUC known as the Special Patrol Group were convicted in 1980 of giving aid to Loyalist forces in the form of transportation, kidnappings, shootings and bombing attacks.

Besides these two Special Patrol Group members, no RUC or PSNI officers have ever been charged with crimes.

But it is what McIntyre calls the “retire and rehire” phenomenon taking place within the RUC-turned-PSNI that gives him the greatest doubt that Good Friday Agreement reforms have changed the police force’s apparent anti-nationalist leanings. A watchdog audit of the PSNI in 2011 found that almost 20% of the over 5,000 RUC officers laid off under reforms were rehired. The report describes the organization’s apparent reversion to its RUC roots as “out of control,” according to the Guardian, which ran the story in October 2011. The push to enter more Irish Catholics into the police force, a key reform from Good Friday, is clearly being rolled back.

And the Boston College subpoena, in light of all this, may very well be a political fishing expedition designed, at least in part, on hunting down old enemies of the British state.

Two plausible scenarios could emerge if the DOJ and PSNI are successful in accessing the Belfast Project interviews: Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams will face prosecution for his alleged involvement in Jean McConville’s murder. Irish nationalist rage would likely spill out into the streets of Belfast.

Conversely, the PSNI may do nothing with the archive. If that happens, McIntyre tells me, “the British government decides it is too politically sensitive – not least for what may be revealed about their own knowledge and activities – to bring forward any criminal prosecution. Loyalist reaction to this will be, predictably, outrage. They will hardly accept, especially given the lengths that the British are going to obtain this material, that it was worthless.”

Clearly, either outcome could set off the tinderbox – and the two journalists who created the project have, since 2011, been consumed with preventing the potential unraveling of Northern Ireland’s peace process.

They’ve also rushed to protect what they correctly perceive as an erosion of journalistic freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment here in the U.S. More on this latter point shortly.

Anthony McIntyre and Ed Maloney began their protracted legal battle with prosecutor Ortiz after Boston College refused to appeal a lower court’s decision that the DOJ’s grab at the archives was legitimate. The two men found support from the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Irish American Coalition, all of which added amicus briefs to the case. After two years of overturned appeals, McIntyre and Maloney finally kicked the case up to the Supreme Court – only to have the High Court refuse to hear it last week.

With that final blow, every legal avenue is now exhausted.

This leaves only a political redress through a newly-minted Secretary of State John Kerry who, before taking the new post this year, served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In a January 2012 letter to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kerry expressed concern “about the impact that [the subpoena] may have on the continued success of the Northern Ireland peace process.”

Senator Kerry added: “It is possible that some former parties to the conflict may perceive the effort by the U.K. authorities to obtain this information as contravening the spirit of the Good Friday Accords.”

As noted earlier, the DOJ’s actions most certainly violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the U.S. – U.K. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. In a report submitted by Senator Richard Luger in September 2006, Luger states:

“The Senate’s understanding [is] that the purpose of the Treaty is to strengthen law enforcement cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom by modernizing the extradition process for all serious offenses and that it is not intended to reopen issues addressed in the Belfast Agreement or to impede any further efforts to resolve the conflict in Northern Ireland.”

Kerry and Luger were not alone in their concern.

New York Senator Charles Schumer expressed consternation that the DOJ’s subpoena not only threatened to destroy a fragile peace across the Atlantic, but that it targeted freedom of the press. In a letter sent to both Secretary of State Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, Schumer stated:

“There are significant issues of journalistic confidentiality and academic freedom that are called into question as a result of this legal maneuver that make it dubious…I have always been a champion of protecting sensitive source material that is gathered by researchers – journalists and academics alike—and I am concerned that this action presents an infringement on that underpinning of the First Amendment.”

One need only look at the DOJ’s dogged pursuit of activists, such as the late Aaron Swartz, to see how far the Justice Department will go to score wins in court. It is not a stretch to believe they could use subpoenas to violate journalist-source confidentiality in future cases.

With over 100 similar bilateral assistance treaties between the U.S. and other countries in existence today, the threat this subpoena poses may have far-reaching – and unimaginable – consequences for international political movements, freedom of dissent and our own First Amendment.

Dustin M. Slaughter is the Founder of The David and Goliath Project. Follow him on Twitter: @DustinSlaughter.

Shaker Aamer photographed with his two children

Once upon a time, Daily Kos had numerous diaries on the ongoing use of torture by the United States, or on the false evidence, much of it wrung from tortured prisoners held by the US or by foreign countries via rendition, that was used to start the Iraq War. But today, such diaries are the exception rather than the rule.

The general turning away from the torture issue follows the policy of the very popular US president Barack Obama who has famously said that the country must look forward and not backwards when it comes to the torture scandal. By that he means, no investigations or prosecutions for torturers.

But he never told the American people it would mean making deals with torturers in the Saudi government, or with allies, who would seek to hold one Guantanamo detainee in particular indefinitely, or ship him to the Saudi dungeons, all so evidence he could supply in an ongoing investigation could be suppressed.

If proven true, this obstruction of justice is a crime. But more than that, it is an attempt to falsify history, and that may be its real legacy. More immediately, it is destroying the life and family of an innocent man, British resident Shaker Aamer, cleared for release from Guantanamo by both Bush and Obama administrations, but still held in indefinite detention by the U.S.

Nearly a dozen years after terrorists guided commercial jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the prosecution of the alleged masterminds of the 9/11 attacks continues to be plagued by bizarre incidents that have threatened to derail the proceedings at Guantanamo Bay.

Now, some observers are beginning to question whether a series of seemingly embarrassing gaffes might instead be part of a strategic plan by the Obama administration to shutter the military prison at Gitmo.

“Perhaps I’m wrong, but there are too many fiascos in too short an order to be the result of random chance,” said Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who for two years served as chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo.

[snip]

“I believe it is all part of a plan to tamp down outrage when President Obama announces that he’s closing Gitmo, sending the majority of the detainees already cleared for transfer home, bringing the rest to the US and prosecuting them in federal courts,” said Davis, who helped write parts of the 2006 Military Commissions Act passed by Congress, and has since become a vocal critic of the use of the system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

“I suspect they are painting the picture to show it’s taken too long, and there’s no end in sight; it’s too fatally flawed to save; it creates too much damage to our standing in the eyes of our allies and enemies alike; and it costs too much money at a time when money is tight to continue trying to spit-shine the Gitmo cow-pile in hopes that someday it will shine up nice and look pretty,” he said.

The entire report is well worth reading.

Cyrus the Great, the first king of the Persian Empire, came to throne in 550 BC, but since almost 2000 years before him when In-Su-Kush-Siranna was the ruler of the Kingdom of Aratta, Nowruz has been celebrated in the Greater Iran which was consisted of several provinces that currently constitute modern countries like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Iraq and parts of India and Turkey.

Nowruz is considered as the most important national holiday in Iran as it marks the beginning of a new solar year and the arrival of spring. According to the Persian calendar, Nowruz begins exactly on the moment when the center of the Sun is in the same plane as the Earth’s equator and the tilt of the Earth’s axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun. That’s why Nowruz, which signifies the commencement of vernal equinox, starts on March 20 or 21 but a different time each year. The reason is that the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is not the same every year, but the beauty and wonderfulness of Nowruz is that it starts on a unique moment each time and people excitedly and breathlessly wait for the announcement of what is known as the moment of the transition of the year. This moment is astronomically and mathematically calculated according to the Jalali solar calendar in a precise manner and officially inaugurates the New Year.

Unquestionably, Nowruz is one of the prominent and outstanding hallmarks of the Persian culture and Iranian civilization. It represents the glory and magnificence of ancient Iran and manifests a sense of national pride and dignity for all the Iranians around the world. In his long epic poem Shahnameh, the 10^th century Iranian poet and philosopher Ferdowsi talks in detail about the origins and roots of Nowruz. He says that when the legendary, prehistoric Iranian king Jamshid Jam conquered the world and ascended to throne, he declared that day, which fortuitously coincided with the first day of spring, as Nowruz and the beginning of Iranian New Year. On that day, Iranians from across the country would come to visit Persepolis (the ancient capital of the Persian Empire) to hold festivals, celebrate Nowruz, receive rewards and gifts from the king, enjoy eating festive meals, dried nuts, fruits and sweetmeat, singing happy songs and performing plays.

Nowruz is important in that it comes exactly after the winter ends, and that is why Iranians believe Nowruz is a feast of rebirth and rejuvenation that injects fresh and warm blood into the veins of the frosty and frozen nature. Iran, which is famous for its climatic diversity and unique nature, becomes very beautiful and eye-catching in the spring, and especially during the 13 days of Nowruz festivals. Fragrant flowers and attractive plants grow in large quantities in northern, central and southern parts of Iran and the weather is predominantly mild and moderate in the majority of the cities all around the country.

Nowruz is celebrated from the Farvardin 1 to 13 (Farvardin is the first month of the solar calendar whose name is taken from the Zoroastrian word “Faravashis” meaning “the spirits of the dead.” Iranians believe that the spirits of their deceased beloved ones will return to the material world in the last 10 days of the year.) One of the common traditions of Nowruz that the Iranians are strongly committed to is paying visit to the elderly and meeting the other members of the family. In such meetings, the Iranian families entertain each other with delicious Iranian cuisines, spring fruits, dried nuts, candies, confections, deserts, rice-cakes, pastries and other cookies.

Setting the “Haft-Seen” table is also one of the customs of Nowruz which is seen as a quintessential and typical part of the New Year celebrations. Haft means “seven” in Persian, and “seen” stands for the sign of the 15^th letter of Persian alphabet which sounds “s”. The Haft-Seen table is named so because there are seven items on this table whose name start with the Persian letter “seen”. Each of these seven items signifies a certain idea, concept and meaning. These items include “Senjed” that is the sweet, dry fruit of the lotus tree or “silver berry” and denotes love and affection, “Sumaq” or what the English call “sumac”, that is the crushed spices of berries and symbolizes sunrise and the warmth of life, “Seeb” or red apple that stands for health and beauty, “Seer” or “garlic” which indicates good health and wellbeing, “Samanu” which is a sweet paste made of wheat and sugar and represents fertility and the sweetness of life, “Sabzeh” or sprouted wheat grass which is a sign of renewal of life and rebirth of the nature and “Sonbol” or the purple hyacinth flower that represents prosperity and goodwill in the New Year. However, the majority of Iranian families put more than 7 items on their “Haft-Seen” table settings. The additional things are “Sekkeh” or coins which herald wealth and affluence, “Serkeh” or vinegar that symbolizes age, patience and the toleration of hardships and “Sangak” which is a plain whole wheat sour dough flatbread that characterizes blessing and good luck. Iranians also put colored eggs and a bowl of goldfish on their traditional Haft-Seen table and consider these two elements as signs of fertility, welfare and happiness.

Of the other elements placed on the beautiful Haft-Seen table is mirror. Mirror is a symbol of purity, reflection and honesty and the Iranians never forget putting a beautifully adorned and decorated mirror on their traditional table setting. They also put a copy of the Holy Quran on their Haft-Seen table which they believe will guard and protect their life in the coming year.

In an elaborate and well-researched article about Nowruz published on Iran Review website, the cultural researcher Firouzeh Mirrazavi writes, “The festival, according to some documents, was observed until the fifth of Farvardin, and then the special celebrations followed until the end of the month. Possibly, in the first five days, the festivities were of a public and national nature, while during the rest of the month it assumed a private and royal character.”

Since Nowruz was historically celebrated in Iran’s ceremonial capital Persepolis [Takht-e-Jamshid] in the southern city of Shiraz, every year thousands of Iranians travel to Shiraz to take part in the national celebrations of Nowruz. Even the foreign tourists who travel to Iran to take part in the celebrations prefer to visit Shiraz or Isfahan during the 13 days of Nowruz.

But why is Nowruz extended for 13 days? According to the ancient belief of the Iranians, 13 is an inauspicious and ominous number. In the 13^th day of Farvardin, Iranian families gather in parks, gardens, farms and other green places, eat cuisines which contain certain local herbs, talk to each other in a friendly manner and throw their sprouted wheat grasses into rivers and waterways and believe that by leaving the “Sabzeh” in the rivers and canals, they throw away the bad luck and misfortune associated with the number 13 and the 13^th day of the year and this way, they guarantee their New Year and prevent the hardships and calamities from spreading into their life. They think that the Sabzeh which is pitched in the rivers will take the bad luck with itself to an undisclosed and unknown destination.

In Nowruz, the senior members of the family such as the father, mother, elder sisters and brothers, uncles, aunts and grandparents pay the younger members certain amounts of cash as a gift for the New Year. This reward is called “Eidi” and is not usually spent during the whole year but saved and kept as a token of blessing and wellbeing.

With all of its beauties and splendor, Nowruz is now considered a global festival as it was officially recognized and registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in February 2010. The same year, the UN General Assembly recognized March 21 as the International Day of Nowruz, describing it as a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over thousands of years.

Nowruz is a relic of the past days, a remnant of the very first years when the human civilization took shape. It removes the religious, cultural, lingual and national boundaries and connects the hearts of millions of people who want to take part in a unique and unparalleled ceremony marking not only the beginning of New Year, but the end of the distressed winter and arrival of the delightful spring. It’s not simply a source of honor for Iranians who observe and celebrate it, but an opportunity for the congregation and solidarity of all the peace-loving and peace-making nations around the world.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer and a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Jared Rodriguez/Truthout

Crossposted from Freedom of The Press Foundation.

Jason Leopold is Truthout’s lead investigative reporter. Freedom of the Press Foundation is crowd-funding in support of his FOIA work and on-the-scenes reporting at the Guantanamo Bay trials. You can fund his work here.

A couple of years ago, a friend handed me about 500 pages of documents he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from an educational division of the Air Force that contained some explosive revelations about what our young nuclear missile officers are taught about the ethics and morals of launching nuclear weapons.

Buried within these documents were 43 PowerPoint slides that contained disturbing passages from the Bible that aimed to show nuclear missile officers in training that Jesus Christ would have supported the launching of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the PowerPoint slides quoted Werner Von Braun, regarded as the father of the US space program, as a moral authority on using nuclear weapons to annihilate enemies. Braun was a former member of the Nazi Party who used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured French anti-Nazi partisans and civilians, and others to help build the V-2 rocket for Hitler’s Third Reich.

The use of religious imagery in the slides and the Biblical citations appeared to be a violation of the First Amendment establishing a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which specifically prohibits a “religious test.”

So I wrote up a report. About a day or so after my story was published the Air Force canceled the ethics training, which had been in place for more than two decades. In fact, the Air Force pulled all of its training materials ”that address morals, ethics, core values and related character development issues” pending a “comprehensive review.”

A month later, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz issued a rare policy memorandumto Air Force leadership on “religious neutrality,” advising “leaders at all levels” that they must “must balance Constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion.”

By the time attention surrounding the story, which also included a Republican member of Congressweighing in on the controversy, died down it had gone global and was picked up by more than 100 domestic and international news outlets.

I was stunned, to say the least, that the documents I obtained and used as primary source material in the “Jesus Love Nukes” report would elicit a swift response from the Air Force, Congress and the media.

I referred to this story because it is the catalyst behind my aggressive use of FOIA over the past two years.

Naturally, I was eager to continue this style of reporting and had hoped that I could use FOIA to pry loose documents and reveal government secrets on matters pertaining to civil liberties, human rights, national security and counterterrorism, subjects that I have reported extensively on over the past decade.

While I had filed a few dozen FOIA requests in the past, I did not have much success obtaining responsive records due to the classified nature of the materials I sought and the fact that I was not very well educated on how to file appeals to the denials I had received. I also enjoyed access to anonymous sources I cultivated who disclosed information to me on these matters and I felt that a FOIA request was unnecessary as well as burdensome.

But, the “Jesus Loves Nukes” story taught me that there’s a huge difference between quoting an anonymous source and publishing the contents of a smoking gun document. For one, a report based on the latter helps build public trust and is bound to attract the attention of other journalists and a wider audience whereas the use of anonymous sources can sometimes result in a story being completely ignored by the media because it can be difficult to confirm the claims leveled by anonymous sources.

Immediately after the publication of the “Jesus Loves Nukes” story I asked my friend who turned over the Air Force documents to me and is a “frequent FOIA requester” to give me a crash course on writing good FOIA requests and I went to town, filing dozens of requests for a wide-range of documents with numerous government agencies. I have since learned that a strong FOIA request can make a difference between receiving responsive records and a flat-out denial.

The timing of my FOIA lesson turned out to be perfect. The anonymous sources I had come to rely upon weren’t speaking out anymore largely because of the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers and leaks to the media as well as its determination to punish suspected leakers by prosecuting them under the Espionage Act.

My sources’ fears were justified. Last week, I obtained through a FOIA request a copy of a memo signed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last July during the height of the anti-leak furor in which he outlined steps the intelligence community was ordered to take to deter “unauthorized disclosures” of classified information to the media.

In February 2011, a month after I broke the “Jesus Loves Nukes” report, I published an exclusive story about former Guantanamo prisoner, David Hicks, an Australian who was imprisoned at the detention facility for five years and alleged he was brutally tortured. Hicks had not granted any interviews since he was released from Guantanamo. I was the first journalist he agreed to speak with.

But I needed to try and confirm some aspects of Hicks’ story with other people who were present at Guantanamo when he was. So I sought out former guards. A half-dozen weren’t willing to speak with me, saying they were forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited them from discussing anything about what they witnessed or experienced while serving at Guantanamo. The guards said they feared they would lose their security clearance and be vulnerable to prosecution if they spoke out publicly. Fortunately, however, I found two guards who were willing to take the risk: Brandon Neely, who had actually escorted Hicks off the bus in January 2002, a week or so after Guantanamo opened, and Albert Melise, a guard who befriended Hicks at Camp Echo where Hicks was held in isolation.

Melise had never spoken publicly before. He described his job duties at the prison and said he was tortured by his experience serving as a Guantanamo guard. A few weeks after my story on Hicks was published, Melise, an Army reservist, was accused of leaking classified information to me and was barred from reenlistment. Melise’s story served as confirmation to other Guantanamo guards that they should remain silent and their responses underscores why I relied heavily on FOIA to continue my investigative work on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other pressing issues.

But I never thought that filing a FOIA request would result in a government agency launching an investigation of sorts to find out exactly what I was looking into and why. Yet, that’s what happened in the summer of 2011.

I received a phone call from a woman who said an FBI special agent was at her house and was interrogating her husband about a FOIA request I had filed in March 2011 in which I had sought his case file from the FBI. This was no ordinary citizen whose file I was trying to pry loose. It was Hesham Abu Zubaydah, the younger brother of the Guantanamo prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured after 9/11 and the first “war on terror” suspect subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding while detained at a CIA black site prison.

Unbeknownst to the media, Hesham had been living in the United States since 1998. I was working on a profile about his brother when I discovered that Hesham was in the US. I had hoped Hesham would be able to shed some light on his brother’s alleged terrorist activities but I determined after speaking with him he had his own important story to tell, which included spying on mosques in Portland, Oregon at the behest of the FBI. Hesham had signed a Privacy Act waiver authorizing the FBI to turn over all of his files to me.

Perhaps the fact that I intended to reveal FBI secrets is what led the agency to send Special Agent Bill Tidwell to Hesham’s house in August 2011 to find out, allegedly, whether I had bribed and/or coerced Hesham into signing the waiver and if Hesham would consider dropping his FOIA request if the FBI helped him obtain a green card.

Furious, I phoned the FBI to find out why the agency was interfering with my work. A spokeswoman told me the visit Tidwell made to Hesham was not at all unusual. However, she refused to disclose how often the FBI sent agents to the homes of individuals who received written permission from third parties to obtain their case files. So I filed a FOIA request with the FBI requesting the information. The FBI refused to disclose it so I sued. The case is still pending.

Furthermore, since Tidwell used my name during his meeting with Hesham in August 2011 I filed a FOIA request with the FBI requesting all documents that mentioned me, Jason Leopold, and referred to the day in question. Eight months later, I received three redacted pages. Sure enough, there was my name, in the FBI agent’s report. I must admit, seeing my name in the documents was chilling.

I later learned from an FBI analyst that the agency’s FOIA office had referred to me as a “FOIA Terrorist” due to the number of records requests I had filed in Hesham’s case and on other subjects as well as my requests for FBI “processing notes,” which are internal documents that provides insight into how a FOIA request is handled.

The FBI stonewalled on turning over Hesham’s case file to me but they did not derail my story, despite their best attempts to do so. Last May, after 14-months of investigative work, I published a 15,000-word investigative report on Hesham’s plight that says everything you need to know about post-9/11 America. I relied heavily on FOIA to tell his story and obtained more than 1,500 pages of documents from other government agencies. I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI in the Eastern District of California late last year for failing to turn over Hesham’s case file. His story will not be fully told until I obtain those documents.

The FOIA work pertaining to Hesham’s case also led to a lawsuit I filed against the FBI, Department of Defense (DoD), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that resulted in a significant victory that now benefits all FOIA requesters. Because the FBI had been dragging its feet in turning over documents it held on Hesham, I was advised by Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors and Truthout’s FOIA attorney, to request from the FBI’s FOIA office an estimated date of completion of my FOIA. McClanahan told me by law all government agencies are required to provide requesters with estimated dates of completion when asked.

But the FBI refused to do so even though I had cited the relevant part of the law to the FBI’s FOIA public information officer I was communicating with several times during a somewhat hostile email exchange. McClanahan said the FBI wasn’t the only government agency violating this provision of FOIA and he suggested we sue the FBI, DoD and NARA to force them to comply. Last June, in response to my lawsuit and nearly four years after changes to FOIA went into effect, these agencies issued policy directives advising their analysts to provide requesters with estimated dates of completion when asked.

Although various government agencies continue to stonewall my attempts to liberate classified documents through FOIA, , there have also been other FOIA victories worth highlighting.

Last summer, the Defense Department’s Inspector General turned over a highly classified report that contained minimal redactions to my colleague, Jeffrey Kaye, and me that for the first time revealed how Guantanamo prisoners had been forcibly drugged, at times with mind-altering substances, and had been subjected to so-called “chemical restraints” when they misbehaved. Physicians for Human Rights noted that the report Kaye and I obtained through our FOIA work “contains the first explicit admission by the US government that these types of drugs were used on detainees against their will.”

I also obtained from the Department of the Army, as a result of another FOIA request, two autopsy reports related to the 2011 deaths of two Afghan Guantanamo prisoners, one of who reportedly committed suicide. The autopsy reports, which were secret and turned over to me last week, raise further questions about the prisoners’ treatment.

My FOIA work on Guantanamo continues with a request for records filed with the FBI, CIA, DoD, State Department and other agencies for all records pertaining to the treatment of “war on terror” prisoners in custody of the US government. I’m also involved in four other FOIA lawsuits, another of which is against the FBI over the agency’s refusal to turn over all of their documents on the Occupy Wall Street protest. Furthermore, I still have about 150 outstanding FOIA requests that will keep me busy for the next decade.

While reporting that attempts to shine a light on malfeasance at the highest levels of government may no longer generate the same number of page views or stoke the same amount of outrage from the public as we saw during George W. Bush’s presidency, I believe it’s still important to create a public record to document these government secrets if for no other reason than no one else will.

But there are limitations to FOIA, as historian and frequent FOIA requester Trevor Griffey reminded me recently.

“The FOIA process, while remaining important to reporters, at the same time still is highly limited, because it exposes how secretive our government is more often than it reveals what our government is actually doing,” Griffey told me. “The redaction/ excision process protects from disclosure those things which most need to be made public.”

An Associated Press report published this week underscores Griffey’s point. An analysis by AP found the Obama administration has cited national security to justify its censoring of government records more often than any other time since Obama was sworn into office in 2009 and signed an executive order promising to usher in a new era of open government and transparency.

The AP report means my job will become harder.

I’d love nothing more than to have whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg or Pfc. Bradley Manning turn over classified material to me about certain government activities that deserves to be exposed. But until then FOIA remains the most powerful tool in my reporting arsenal.

Jason Leopold is Truthout’s lead investigative reporter. Freedom of the Press Foundation is crowd-funding in support of his FOIA work and on-the-scenes reporting at the Guantanamo Bay trial. You can fund his work here.

The US government detained at Guantanamo a prisoner who was hospitalized for auditory hallucinations he suffered as a teenager and had twice attempted suicide in 2009 while imprisoned at the detention facility.

In March of 2009, Hajji Nassim was found with cuts on both sides of his neck. A month later, he lacerated both of his arms. He blamed the latter suicide attempt on “jinn,” Arabic for demons. Nassim then spent a year at the prison’s behavioral health unit. After he was released, he was administered before bed one milligram of Risperdal, an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia, to quell his suicidal thoughts and auditory and visual hallucinations. The medication apparently kept him stable.

But despite his well-documented history of mental illness, US officials justified Nassim’s continued detention by insisting that he was a prominent al-Qaeda figure. He was one of the last prisoners transferred to Guantanamo, arriving at the prison in September 2007.

However, Nassim, who was known as Inayatullah at Guantanamo, would eventually succeed in taking his own life. In the dead of night on May 18, 2011, he secured a white bed sheet to a pipe in the recreation area adjacent to his cell, stuck his head through a noose he made and hung himself. He was found at around 3:30 AM. First responders on the scene cut the bed sheet and attempted to revive Nassim in the cell and at a medical treatment facility he was taken to on the island. But efforts to save him failed. Nassim was officially pronounced dead nearly 90 minutes later. He was the eighth prisoner reported to have died at Guantanamo.

Those are the findings contained in Nassim’s autopsy report obtained by Truthout under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the US Army Medical Command.

Read the rest of this report at Truthout.

The Blind Sheikh, photographed on August 1, 2006. Photo/Wikimedia

February 26th, 2013, the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and injured a thousand, may be the latest proof of George Santayana’s prediction that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Why? Because Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric convicted as the leader of that bombing cell, continues to inspire acts of terror throughout the middle east, including the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September and the January Algerian hostage crisis  — both directly linked to demands by Islamic radicals to “free the blind Sheikh.”

Indeed, new evidence was uncovered last summer by ex-FBI asset Emad Salem, proving that Abdel-Rahman, now 74 and serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison, was able to issue a fatwa that helped propel Egyptian Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi to victory – a bit of prison-cell electioneering that prompted an immediate quid pro quo by Morsi demanding Abdel-Rahman’s release.

That set off a firestorm of unwanted fears on the U.S. right that the Obama administration would be naïve enough to extradite Sheikh Omar, the head of al-Gamma Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) one of the world’s most virulent terrorist organizations; responsible for the bloody 1997 Luxor massacre in which fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians were murdered.

Still, in the bickering that turned the Sheik’s purported exit into a rallying point for Obama bashers, the full significance of Abdel-Rahman as a flashpoint for global terror has been lost. Further, the failure by administration officials and critics to appreciate his key role in the ongoing jihad could have deadly consequences in the future. Tuesday’s anniversary of the Twin Towers bombing is an opportunity for us to answer the question: just how dangerous is the blind Sheikh?

The Prince of Jihad

Blinded shortly after birth, Abdel-Rahman had memorized the Koran by the age of eleven. He earned a degree in Koranic studies in 1972 from the Al Azhar University in Cairo, where he was influenced by the writings Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who was an ardent member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928, The Brotherhood spawned two of Egypt’s most violent terror sects: The Islamic Group run by Sheikh Omar, and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Both Abdel-Rahman and al-Zawahiri were jailed following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat and by separate routes, the two of then found their way to Afghanistan; al-Zawahiri aligning with Osama bin Laden to form al Qaeda in 1988 and Sheikh Omar connecting with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord and future Taliban commander who became one of the conduits for the billions in U.S. covert military aid to the Mujahedeen. On his return to Egypt in 1990, the blind Sheikh was subjected to house arrest, but he escaped to the Sudan and despite his presence on multiple watch-lists, succeeded in entering the U.S. in July, thanks, some say, to help from the CIA for his aid in the secret Afghan arms campaign.

Before long, Abdel Rahman was preaching at the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn and the ironically named al-Salaam (mosque of peace) located on the third floor of a building on Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City.  He was soon linked directly to two violent homicides.

The first blood

On November 5, 1991, one of Abdel-Rahman’s devoted followers, an Egyptian emigré named El Sayyid Nosair, committed what was arguably the first act of violence by al Qaeda on U.S. soil – the bloody assassination ofRabbi Meir Kahane, founder of The Jewish Defense League.

After the killing, FBI agents seized forty-seven boxes of evidence from Nosair’s home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, proving that a bombing conspiracy was afoot with the WTC as a target. Among the files were maps of the Twin Towers. A passage inside Nosair’s notebook called for the “destruction of the enemies of Allah… by… exploding… their high world buildings.” There’s little doubt that the blind Sheikh was the instigator, demanding, in one of his sermons that his followers “mount steeds of war (and) strike terror into the enemies of Islam.”

Then within months, the Sheikh began to quarrel with Mustafa Shalabi, the Egyptian émigré who ran the Alkifah Center at the al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue. The Alkifah was the principal U.S. office of the Makhtab al-Khidamat (MAK), a worldwide network where millions of dollars in cash was collected to support the Afghan war against the Soviets.

After the MAK’s founder was killed by a car bomb, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri merged their new terror network with the MAK and soon al-Qaeda had what amounted to a New York clubhouse at Shalabi’s Alkifah Center. But even after the Soviets had withdrawn from Kabul, hundreds of thousands of dollar in cash continued to flow into the MAK and it didn’t take long for Sheikh Omar to covet the fortune controlled by Mustafa Shalabi.

Even though Shalabi had sponsored Sheikh Omar’s entry into the United States, he balked when the blind cleric demanded half of the center’s one million dollars in annual income. After that, the Sheikh began denouncing him as a “bad Muslim” even suggesting that his fellow Egyptian was embezzling the Alkifah’s funds.

On February 26, 1991, sensing that his life was in danger, Shalabi hurriedly packed for a flight to Cairo, where his family was waiting. He never made it to the airport. A few days later, a neighbor of Shalabi’s noticed that the door to his Sea Gate, Brooklyn, apartment was open. The Alkifah director was sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.

“He was knifed, shot and beaten with a baseball bat,” said former Joint Terrorism Task Force investigator Det. Tommy Corrigan. “This wasn’t some genteel thing. He was made an example of.”

Connecting the dots on 9/11

With two acts of homicide linked to the blind Sheikh within a year of his arrival in New York, the FBI soon uncovered a pattern of evidence that, properly analyzed, might have forewarned of the September 11th attacks a decade later. The first “dot” surfaced when the Feds identified Sphinx Trading, a check-cashing story in Jersey City where both Sheikh Omar and El Sayyid Nosair had mailboxes. Sphinx was located in a building on Kennedy Boulevard several doors away from the blind cleric’s al-Salaam mosque.

The second “dot” became known in 1994 after the feds compiled a list of 172 un-indicted co-conspirators in the “Day of Terror” case in which the Sheikh and eleven others were indicted for a plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, the U.N. and 26 Federal Plaza which houses the FBI’s New York Office (NYO). Named on that list along with Osama bin Laden and Mustafa Shalabi was Waleed al-Noor, co-incorporator of Sphinx Trading.

Flashing forward to July of 2011 and the third “dot” — Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, obtained the fake I.D.’s they used to board that flight at Sphinx Trading. Who did they get them from? None other than Mohammed El-Attriss, another Egyptian who was al-Noor’s partner in the incorporation of the check-cashing store.

That begs the question of how the two “bin Laden offices of origin” — the FBI’s NYO and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — could have failed to connect those dots; two of which bore a direct connection to Sheikh Omar.

As far back as November, 2006 with the publication of my latest book from HarperCollins, TRIPLE CROSS, I made the argument that if the Feds had only devoted a small portion of the resources they spent trying to “get” John Gotti, and monitored Sphinx Trading, they would have been in the middle of the 9/11 plot two months before al-Midhar and al-Hazmi slammed into The Pentagon.

It’s a question that takes on new significance when one considers the other iconic acts of terror committed in his name since the 1993 bridge and tunnel plot.

A rallying point for jihadis

Beginning in 1996, the FBI received the first of three warnings that bin Laden would attempt to hijack a plane to free the Sheikh. When al-Qaeda took credit for the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Sheikh Omar’s release was one of their demands. Weeks before the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden appeared in a video fatwa, demanding that the Sheikh be set free.

Another plot to release him was cited in that infamous Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) sent to George Bush in August 2011, and just days before the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban government in Kabul was rumored to be offering a swap — the group of eight Western aid workers being held captive, for the Blind Sheikh. As late as April 22, 2005, in entering a plea, Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “twentieth hijacker,” declared that his goal in the aborted plan to fly a plane into the White House, was to free Omar Abdel Rahman.

Meanwhile, the blind cleric, in federal prison since 1993, has demonstrated extraordinary staying power. In December 2006, while in custody at the U.S. Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, Rahman then sixty-eight, was diagnosed with a tumor on his liver and rushed to an area hospital after spitting up blood. It was believed at the time that he was near death and the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the Sheikh’s last will and testament, distributed by al-Qaeda, had exhorted his followers to “extract the most violent revenge” after he died.

Then, exhibiting a kind of Rasputin-like resilience, Rahman not only pulled through, but began to thrive. He was eventually moved to the Federal Medical Center at Butner, North Carolina, where his continuing influence on world events became clear in the summer of 2012.

Impacting the Egyptian election

In 2009 following a lecture I gave at NYU, Emad Salem, the ex-Egyptian Army officer who infiltrated the blind Sheikh’s cell for the FBI in 1992 reached out to me after years in witness protection. Salem and his family had been in hiding for 14 years after he’d served as the principal witness against the Sheikh in the “Day of Terror” trial.

During a series of interviews Salem told me about a key piece of evidence in the Mustafa Shalabi homicide that had never surfaced in the media. That prompted the NYPD to reopen the investigation. As a result, the Feds produced a series of FBI 302 memos identifying the killers, along with a second gunman in the Kahane assassination. Since then, while continuing to live under an assumed identity, Salem has regularly monitored the political events in Egypt.

On May 30, 2012 on the eve of the presidential election, Salem alerted me that the website maintained by Sheikh Omar’s family, issued a political fatwa from the imprisoned cleric endorsing Morsi’s election . In that admonition, the blind sheikh reminded “every Muslim and citizen of Egypt who fears about his country, that he or she must elect Dr. Mohammed Morsi, since he is the one representing Islam the most and representing the Revolution.”

For months prior to the election, followers of the Blind Sheikh had been camped outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, demanding his release. Now they were rallying in Tahrir Square. The day after Morsi’s narrow victory, Emad Salem discovered that Sheikh Omar, who is supposed to get a single, fifteen-minute “humanitarian” call to his family each month, was able to make a second call; this time congratulating the president-elect. Then, within days of his election, at a rally in front of Abdel Rahman’s family, Morsi returned the favor by declaring that he would press for the freedom of Sheikh Omar and other terrorists convicted in the United States.

After Morsi’s call for the Sheikh’s release, the issue became a cause célèbre on the U.S. political right. “U.S. State Dept. Considers Release of Blind Sheikh to Egypt” was the headline on Breitbart.com in September. Two days later, the New York Post ran a story referencing President Obama titled, “O Eyes ‘Blind Sheik’ Release: GOPers Blast Idea to Appease Egypt.”

In response, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that the Sheikh had been rightfully convicted and she emphatically denied that the United States had plans to extradite him. Just yesterday the Justice Department released this statement: “The blind Sheikh will spend the rest of his life in a U.S. federal prison. Period.”

But there’s little doubt that the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other diplomats, was tied to growing violence directly related to Abdel Rahman. By September 13, CNN reported that one group thought to be responsible was called “the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.”

Rahman’s deadly influence as a rallying point for jihadists was reinforced on October 28th, 2012, when bin Laden’s successor, Dr. al-Zawahiri, issued a two-hour video calling on Muslims worldwide to kidnap westerners and “spare [no] efforts” to free Sheikh Omar. In January, the principal demand of the al Qaeda-linked Masked Brigade which staged the deadly Amenas Algerian kidnapping, was that the U.S. release Abdel Rahman and a second captive terrorist.

“What happened in New York two decades ago,” says Emad Salem, “is still causing blood to be spilled in the middle east and threatening U.S. security. The Sheikh is the prince of jihad and even from inside a prison cell he wields tremendous power.”

Containing the blind Sheikh

Few, outside the conservative wing of the GOP believe there is a chance that Abdel-Rahman, one of the most dangerous terrorists every convicted, will ever leave a U.S. prison, but there are valid concerns about the continuing influence he wields as an inmate. The significance of allowing him to communicate with his followers was underscored in 2005 with the conviction of Lynne F. Stewart his former lawyer.

Found guilty of conspiracy after messages from Abdel Rahman were smuggled to the Islamic Group following her visits to him in federal custody, Stewart was sentenced to twenty-eight months in Federal prison. Then in 2010, as a result of perjury at her trial and her lack of remorse, she was re-sentenced to ten years. The Second Circuit Court of appeals affirmed the sentence last June.

Ramzi Yousef, who built the 1993 WTC device has been held under what the Bureau of Prisons calls “special administrative measures” since 1998. At his sentencing Federal Judge Kevin Duffy called Yousef “a virus that must be locked away,” and ever since then he’s been in solitary lockdown in a 7 by 11 foot cell at the ADX Florence, the so-called “Supermax” prison. Pursuant to a 15-page list of rules, Yousef can read books and watch a small black & white T.V. but he’s forbidden from making communications to the outside world. And for good reason.

Linking the two WTC attacks

In April 2010, after years of denial by Justice Department officials and the 9/11 Commission that there was a connection between Yousef’s WTC bombing two decades ago and the September 11th attacks, the SDNY updated the superseding indictment of Yousef to include his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) for his role in the airliner hijacking plot that killed more than 3,000.

I first reported that link in my book 1000 Years for Revenge in 2003, but it was steadfastly denied by federal prosecutors including Patrick Fitzgerald and the 9/11 Commission’s Staff Statement 15 which claimed that Yousef was merely ““part of a loose network of extremist Sunni Islamists.”

In a 2005 interview, Fitzgerald, the former head of the organized crime and terrorism unit in the SDNY, said, “People assume that the World Trade Center bombing was an al Qaeda operation. . . . I’ve never assumed that. . . . What I would say is, we learned that the World Trade Center bombing and the Day of Terror plots were part of a jihad network. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude that that was al Qaeda.”

But it’s clear from the SDNY’s new eight-page superseding indictment, available on the NYT website  that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were controlled and funded directly by al Qaeda. Since the blind Sheikh is the convicted leader of the New York cell that spawned that first attack, his ability to communicate with the outside world should be no less restrictive than Yousef’s.

And if there was any doubt that his followers intend to use his potential release as a rallying cry for jihad, Sheikh Omar’s sons issued a new warning on their website last Friday, threatening Washington, “that there will be a hefty price to be paid if the U.S. continues to adopt a stubbornness policy in response to requests to free the ‘Hostage Sheikh.’”

The renewed cries to loosen the reins on Abdel-Rahman may have inspired his former bomb maker. On February 18,  Ramzi Yousef filed suit to get out of solitary confinement and lift the measures muzzling him from speaking to the outside world. Claiming that he’s no longer a threat, Yousef, who also designed the “planes as missiles” plot carried out by his uncle KSM on 9/11, has asked the Supermax warden for permission to enter the general prison population.

President Obama, is scheduled to meet with Dr. Morsi in March. At that time, the Sheikh’s freedom will be at the top of the Egypt’s agenda. But the U.S. president would do well to remember the bomb planted by Ramzi Yousef twenty years ago Tuesday. Executed by a cell controlled by the blind Sheikh, it was a precursor to much of the al Qaeda terror that followed and as Santayana warned, history forgotten is history relived.

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist.